Today in my Issues class, we read over the case Board of Education v. Earls, which concerns the use of random drug testing on students participating in extracurricular activities. It is written, "Under the Policy, students are required to take a drug test before participating in an extracurricular activity, must submit to random drug testing while participating in that activity, and must agree to be tested at any time upon reasonable suspicion." A new implementation of this Policy is that not only is random drug testing a requirement for extracurricular sports, but it is also required for "any [competetive] extracurricular activity." The court holds that "...the invasion of students' privacy is not significant." The reasoning behind this holding was this: extracurricular activities are voluntary; drug abuse is a serious problem and the drug testing program is "designed to deter drug use"; random drug testing helps to keep the students safe; and "the Fourth Amendment does not require a finding of individualized suspicion.
These reasons are all entirely valid. I understand the safety concerns that come with simultaneously participating in an extracurricular and abusing drugs. However, the district is completely disregarding the students' rights to privacy and misinterpreting the Fourth Amendment. It is a shame that these authorities are trying to manipulate us so much as to control our life decisions that we make and learn from for ourselves. The Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution with the notion that individuals have valuable minds and are responsible for themselves, that there should be as little governmental control as possible. People like Thomas Jefferson were aware of political power and its drug-like properties; once one man grasps political power, it is like an addiction. Political power is the will to encroach on an individual that has done no harm. When a man is provided with political power, he will use it more and more to his advantage. That is why the Founders established checks an balances: to prevent any one person from acquiring too much political power. Then, because the Constitution is based on the rights of the individual, the Fourth Amendment is based on the privacy and suspicion of the individual. What the school district is doing here is entirely negating invididual suspicion, a Constitutional right, and implying that their suspicions are towards every student participating in a competitive extracurricular activity. It is plainly unconstitutional. And because the school was granted this Policy, they will likely be granted more that encroach on students' rights. This random drug testing is another step towards "governmental thought control." Thank God there are organizations out there like ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) that agree with my viewpoints and help to preserve our constitutional rights as American citizens. As the ACLU asserts, "...[American] schools are not constitutional dead zones..." Just because we are students should not mean that we have lesser constitutional rights in a school environment. Students are just as American as Americans.
Another consequential concern to this issue is the use of drug-sniffing dogs. Do they encroach on students' rights to privacy? Let us analyze this: the Fourth Amendment states, "...unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause..." The probable cause, in this case, is the dog's sense of smell. Since warrants are not issued in schools, this gives authorities the right to search any private areas in which the dogs smell contraband. These dogs also do not attack students that have done no harm. They do not encroach on our individual rights as students, and they follow constitutional guidelines; thus, they should be okay to use. It would be reasonable to say that anything more enforcing than drug-sniffing dogs would most likely be a form of encroachment on our privacy rights.
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